Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

By now you know that if you are going to be going paperless, backing up your documents is critically important. At the very least I recommend having a local backup on an external hard drive, but ideally you should have at least two backups: one local, and one offsite.

For offsite backup, using an online backup provider is becoming more and more popular, but what do you do if you don’t want your data stored on some company’s server somewhere?

I have a friend in that situation, so we decided to use one of the free features of CrashPlan: it allows you to do encrypted backups to a friend or family member’s computer.

Here’s what we did: I gave him a hard drive to plug in to his computer, he gave me a hard drive to plug into my computer, and then we set Crashplan to backup to each other’s house.

Why Not Just Carry Over A Hard Drive?

A common method of doing offsite backups is to save your stuff to an external hard drive, and then give that hard drive to someone trusted. Then do this on some sort of regular basis. If you ever experience a data loss, you just go get the drive and you are good to go.

The problem with this method for me is that any time something involves manual steps, I know I probably won’t do it consistently. I need things (especially backup) to be automated.

Isn’t CrashPlan Online Backup?

Yes, CrashPlan does have an online backup service called CrashPlan+ (which I do use), but the features I am talking about here are part of the free CrashPlan client software. You can back up to an external hard drive, another computer on your network, or even a friend or family member online.

Seed The Backup

Anyone who has done online backup will be familiar with our first challenge: backing up gigs and gigs of data can take an extremely long time. Neither of us felt like waiting weeks for this to be done, but fortunately we were able to seed the backup first.

What does seed mean? We did the backup first locally. I plugged my drive into my Macbook Pro, created a new backup destination for the drive, selected what I wanted to back up, and then let CrashPlan go to town. Since the drive was connected to my computer, it was very fast. He did the same on his computer.

Exchange the Drives

Once we had both done the local backup, it was time to exchange the drives. Farmhand Ale may or may not have been involved in this, and I think it is safe to say that we were the only ones in the pub that day exchanging hard drives while watching the Top 10 Crazy Hockey Moments Of All Time on TV.

Attach The Archive

Once I had his drive back home, I installed the CrashPlan client software on my Mac Mini and plugged in his drive.

I then fired up the CrashPlan client, logged in with my CrashPlan ID, and then went to Inbound and then Attach an Archive.

It then brought up a dialog box where I could navigate to his drive and the CrashPlan folder:

After that, it added his drive’s backup folder as an Inbound backup source to my CrashPlan, and automatically connected over the Intertubes to his CrashPlan client. After a few minutes, everything was all synchronized up and he could back up to his drive at my house going forward.

He did the same with my drive, and now I can see my drive at his house as a CrashPlan destination:

I Don’t Want My Friend Snooping Through My Stuff!

To be honest, I was really looking forward to poking through my friend’s bank and credit card statements. Unfortunately for me, CrashPlan encrypts everything before upload, which means when I go to look at his drive (and I have), I just see a bunch of nonsense. I can’t actually see his files.

Timing

The only downside to doing an automatic online backup to a friend or family’s computer is that the receiving computer needs to be on for this to work. For us that is not a problem because we both have Mac Minis hooked up to our TVs (all hail Plex), but if you don’t have an always-on computer situation, you can go into the CrashPlan settings and control which times you allow backups to be performed and received.

This is one way to do offsite backups to a friend’s place and it is working great for us so far. How about you? I’d love to hear the ways that you do offsite in the comments.

(Photo by heydrienne)

You may or may not know it, but today has been declared World Backup Day 2011.

Declared by who, you ask? A small group from the website Reddit, which is good enough for me.

On the World Backup Day site, they go through why you should backup and how to do it. It’s all really good advice, and if you have someone who you know should be backing up but isn’t, today is a good day to send the link to this site to them.

Not surprisingly, a number of online backup companies have taken up the cause and are offering contests today. At the time of writing, SpiderOak, BackBlaze, MiMedia, and CrashPlan are all offering special prizes.

You can also follow #WorldBackupDay on Twitter to see other tips and specials.

So, happy World Backup Day. When’s the last time you backed up your documents?

Sometimes when we are trying to figure out how to set up our paperless system, it can be helpful to see how others do things. Macworld contributor Lex Friedman recently wrote an article about his own backup plan.

For what it is worth, my setup is almost exactly the same as his. The only difference is that I stopped having my backup drive plugged into my Airport Extreme, and moved back to having it plugged in locally. Yes it is a bit annoying having to plug it in/dismount it when I am moving my MacBook Pro, but for me I found having my backup wireless slowed things down. This way, I don’t even notice when Time Machine runs.

Also, I have a 2 TB Western Digital Elements drive partitioned – part of it for SuperDuper! and the rest for Time Machine.

Lex says:

In his conclusion to his own backup write-up, Dan Frakes wrote that he’s “admittedly paranoid about losing” his data. So should we all be. My total financial investment in my backup solution is cheap—many 1TB hard drives can be had for under $100, and the $60 that I pay CrashPlan each year is similarly affordable. My data, on the other hand, is priceless. Hard drives crash.

I totally agree. Having multiple backups is important and so cheap nowadays.

How about you, what is your backup setup? Let us know your ideas in the comments.

(Photo by aparejador)

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a great one and are ready and roaring to go for 2011.

As part of my annual review, I was looking back at my logs for sales through Amazon.com, and I thought you might be interested in the top 10 products that DocumentSnap readers bought through Amazon in 2010.

Here it is in pie chart (mmm… pie) form:

Here are the top 10 products:

1. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300: Fujitsu’s personal Mac & Windows document scanner. A little surprised this one was #1 to be honest!
2. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M: Fujitsu’s Mac desktop scanner. Mac users are representing!
3. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500: Fujitsu’s Windows desktop scanner
4. Western Digital Elements 2TB External Drive: Happy to see my favorite external drive listed here
5. Neatco NeatDesk: Neatco’s desktop scanner including the NeatWorks software that a lot of people like
6. ScanSnap Carrying Case: Can’t say I realized so many people use a carrying case for their S1500, but guess I was wrong!
7. Doxie: Apparent’s ultra portable scan-to-cloud scanner
8. NeatReceipts: Neatco’s portable receipt scanner (as the name implies)
9. Fellowes P-57Cs Shredder: Light duty home or home office cross-cut shredder
10. Fellowes SB-99Ci Shredder: Small business cross-cut shredder

So there you go. This list tells me two things:

1. DocumentSnap readers love their ScanSnaps (no surprise)
2. I clearly need to diversify my coverage a bit more (again, not really a surprise, but ignore what I just said until after tomorrow’s post)

Thanks to all the DocumentSnap readers that bought their paperless products through my Amazon links this year. I (or more accurately, Starbucks) thank you very much.

(Photo by Jude Doyland)

Online backup vendor Carbonite has recently rolled out an update to their client software, Carbonite 4.0.

Sadly, the Carbonite 4.0 update is for Windows only, but the company has stated that the Mac version is in the works.

If you’re an existing Carbonite customer, they’re in the process of rolling out the update. If you’re not, they have a 15 day free trial if you want to check it out. The free trial will let you back up everything except video and music.

I decided to check out the new version and see what the highlights are, so here are some of the key points:

• A Restore Manager gives you an interface to restore specific files based on a number of criteria
• Custom Setup to give you more control on what is backed up when, and lets you manage your own encryption key
• Restore Options to let you choose which files to restore first and to help you migrate operating systems
• Versioning to let you restore different versions of changed files
• Some other miscellaneous changes

Restore Manager

The new Restore Manager lets you specific files, browse your backup drive, or just restore everything.

You can use file search to find a name, date, or type of file.

You can also, of course, browse the drive to find your files that way.

By the way, if you delete a file, Carbonite only keeps it for 30 days. Something to keep in mind.

Custom Setup

Carbonite says that 95% of their users just stick with the defaults, but they’ve introduced a more streamlined custom setup section for the power users.

You can:

• Customize what is backed up
• Schedule and manage the backup times
• Manage your own encryption key

The encryption key setting is great for people who want it so that no Carbonite employee can get at their files. (Of course, on the flip side, that means that they can’t help you get your files in the event of some problem).

Just in case you didn’t know, here’s how you can tell what’s being backed up: a green or yellow dot on the file or folder means it’s being backed up. No dot, no backup

Restore Options

You can restore all data with some options:

• Priority file restore: You can choose which files get restored first. This is a good option if you need to do a big restore but don’t want to wait for certain critical files.
• Migration wizard: If you are restoring to a new operating system, for example you backed up on Windows XP but need to restore to Windows 7, chances are your user information and directory locations have changed. The migration wizard will help you map this.
• Summary report at the end: If you want a report of what was restored, you can view it and print it out (but as a DocumentSnap reader, you wouldn’t do that would you?)

Versioning

If you’ve messed up a file and want to restore a previous version, you can do so. Just search for the file in Restore Search and then choose which version you want to restore.

Other Goodies

They’ve streamlined the Info Centre to give it a more clean and clear look.

If you have multiple computers, you can give each machine a nickname so you know which files are from where.

There are other things, but these are the main changes. Any Carbonite users out there on 4.0 yet? How do you like it? Drop a note in the comments and let us know.

As many people know, I am a big believer in a multi-pronged approach to backing up your data.

Yes I am a fan of online backup, but it is good to have your backup local as well. You can never have your important data in too many locations.

Most people, myself included, start out with a cheap external hard drive that they picked up at Costco or wherever, but if you want to take things to the next level, a popular choice is the Drobo.

A Drobo Is Not A Hard Drive

How is a Drobo different from an external drive? Well, to start with, a Drobo isn’t a drive at all. You can think of it as a container that you put hard drives into.

What you do is pick up some good quality hard drives (for example, some 2TB Western Digitals), and put them into the Drobo.

The Drobo will then mirror your data on all the drives, so that if one drive fails (as they often do), your data will be safe on the other drives. You can just swap out the bad drive and put in a new one. You can expand your storage by just adding new drives.

Different Drobos For Different Jobs

There are five different models of Drobos. I’m only going to bother mentioning three of them because frankly, the DroboPro and DroboElite are just crazy expensive.

• Drobo: The original Drobo can take up to four hard drives for up to 16TB of storage. It can connect to your computer with FireWire 800 or USB 2.0
• Drobo S: The next model up is the Drobo S, which has increased speed, hard drive bays, and can connect to your computer with FireWire, USB, or eSATA (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need it). The Drobo S can survive two hard drives failing at the same time and has “self healing technology”, which just means that it is constantly checking your drives and flags bad areas
• Drobo FS: Drobo FS is built for file sharing. It has a Gigabit network port and will attach (obviously) to a network. It has five hard drive bays and has the same dual drive failure and self-healing technology as the Drobo S

Things To Know

There are some things that you should be aware of if you are thinking about picking up a Drobo:

• Storage: To accomplish the data mirroring, quite a bit of the hard drive space is taken up as “overhead”. Drobo provides a capacity calculator so you can tell how much actual space you’ll have.
• Noise: Some people report that their Drobo is quite loud, while other people say they can’t hear theirs at all. I don’t know if it is people with different sensitivities, or bad batches, or what. If you have a Drobo, let us know in the comments what your noise situation is like.
• Price: Drobos are definitely more expensive than just picking up an external hard drive (especially since you need to buy drives too), so that may be an issue for some people

If you have a Drobo, or another “RAID-like” solution that goes beyond just an external HD, let us know in the comments how that is going for you.

Many people know that Dropbox is great for syncing up your files between different computers.

The other day I was thinking about how in the pre-Hootsuite days I used Dropbox to sync my TweetDeck groups between machines, and I thought I’d look into some other creative uses that people have come up with.

Here are some of my favorites:

Lifehacker has two great posts about creative Dropbox uses like:

• Putting an encrypted TrueCrypt volume on Dropbox. If you like the idea of putting things in “the cloud” but are worried about security, this is a great solution. You can have your stuff encrypted before it even goes online.
• Using shared folders to simulate a network drive
• Make a customized start page
• Keep all your documents with you and accessible (even on your mobile device)
• Keeping all your passwords synced
• Run portable applications like Firefox and VLC

The Dropbox fan page on Facebook has a thread called “What do you use Dropbox for?” with some suggestions like:

• Synchronize your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) chat logs
• Have a security camera save images to Dropbox so they can be viewed from anywhere
• Run a website (!) out of the Dropbox folder

MaximumPC has “How to Hack Your Dropbox“, with some tips, my favorite being to catch laptop thieves using a keylogger and Dropbox.

And finally, lets hear from the source itself. Dropbox has a Tips and Tricks wiki with a bunch of ideas, including:

• Sync your Firefox bookmarks
• Sync a USB Drive
• Keep your passwords in sync
• Print to PDF on your Mac
• Remotely print MS Office docs
• Sync your saved Windows games that save in My Games

That should be enough to get you going. Do you have any other awesome Dropbox tips? Let us know in the comments.

A while ago, a reader (Boba Fett to be exact – I guess intergalactic bounty hunters need to back their stuff up too) suggested that amongst the other backup providers that I mention, I should talk about CrashPlan.

Since I know better than to cross the Fett (look what happened to Han), that’s exactly what I will do.

Cross Platform

Being a Mac dude, I appreciate when companies don’t just make software for Windows (though I understand when they do). I was pretty impressed that CrashPlan made their client not just for Windows and Mac, but for Linux and Open Solaris too.

Handles Both Local (For Free!) And Online Backup

One of the decisions people usually make when they think about backing up their computer (if they think about it at all) is whether to back up to an external drive, or whether to back up online.

CrashPlan handles both. The free CrashPlan software will let you automatically back up your stuff to an external USB drive or even to another computer.

The “other computer” part is kind of interesting. Chris over at Solo Technology has taken a clever approach using this.

Now, most of the computers I and family members own tend to have way more hard drive space than we need, so now we’re all hosting each other’s backups.

Here’s what I’ve got setup so far:

• My laptop backs up to my home machine. The backups are fast when both are on at home on the local network. Normally I wouldn’t want backups to be so close to where the machine is at night, but the “key” data on the laptop is also in DropBox so this is acceptable for now (until my little web of backups grows).
• My Home machine backs up to my mother’s machine – 700 miles away.
• Mother backs up to my home machine.
• Father backs up to my home machine.
• Wife is still on Mozy.

As I work on other family member machines I’ll be adding them to the “mesh” as well and continue to aim for geographically diverse options.

It, of course, has an Online Backup service called CrashPlan Central. If you just want to back up one computer it is $4.50/month, or if you want to do the unlimited family thing, it is $8.33/month. If you buy multiple years at once there is a discount.

Get The Party Started

As I’ve written about before, one of the problems with online backup is that the initial backup can take forever to transfer that stuff up to the cloud.

CrashPlan has a pretty clever option where for $125, they’ll send you a 1 TB drive. You can back up your stuff to the drive and mail it back, and they will restore it to your online account in one shot. More details about that here.

“I’m Big On Twitter”

Aside from Boba’s recommendation, I have seen a number of great comments about CrashPlan on Twitter. You can check out a search to see what people say about it.

All in all, CrashPlan looks like a good option if you want to do both offline and online backup. If you have any thoughts/comments/reviews of it, leave a message in the comments!

If you’re a Carbonite online backup customer, they’ve released yet another way to get at your files when away from your computer.  The company has released a Carbonite iPhone App (it works on iPod Touches as well).

From the CEO of Carbonite:

The Carbonite app gives me access to the backed up files from each of my computers, even if the computers are turned off. And I don’t have to be logged into a Wi-Fi connection or lug my laptop with me. It displays my photos, documents, and other important files and allows me to share any of my backed up files with someone else via email, right from the app. It’s fast and super-simple. I’m really proud of this Carbonite app and I hope you all will find it as useful as I do.

Any Carbonite customers want to comment?  Have you tried it out?  Do you see the trend towards getting to your files on a mobile device a useful one?  Let us know in the comments.

Being on the geekier side of the spectrum (as my wife is happy to remind me as I am hooking a Mac Mini up to our TV), I really like hearing about the inner workings of the software that we use. Too often things are dumbed down so much that they aren’t actually saying anything.

SpiderOak, an online backup and sync provider that I mentioned before, has no such problem on their blog.

Take for example their most recent post: Why and How SpiderOak architecture is different than other online storage services: The surprising consequences on database design from our Zero-Knowledge Approach to privacy.  

It goes to great length talking about why they designed the system like they did, and what some of the advantages and disadvantages are. How often do you hear about software companies bringing up their disadvantages?

That said, a surprising benefit is the implications for total service cost. You may have noticed that SpiderOak offers some of the best pricing per gigabyte for online storage available anywhere. There are other factors contributing to this, but it definitely helps that SpiderOak clients handle most of the database work. The server’s role is mostly relegated to data storage and retrieval. This lets us focus on building servers with very dense storage without the need for high speed databases and lots of system memory to run them in. (Although some of those needs reappear for servicing functions like Web-Access and SpiderOak Shares.)

For us, regardless of the advantages and drawbacks of the decisions we made, the choice has always been clear. We set out to build a backup system we ourselves felt comfortable using which is why zero-knowledge privacy was always the right path for us.

The post is a good read and gives the impression (hopefully true) that SpiderOak knows what they are doing.

Anyone else have any geeky software company blog posts they want to share? Let us know in the comments.